Digital Library of Management Laws: California Current Large Marine Ecosystem

Management of the marine environment traditionally has been divided into individual sectors, such as transportation, mining, and fishing. Combined with increased ocean uses and growing coastal populations, fragmented sector-based management is a source of today's problems with ocean health, such as depleted fisheries, disappearing wetlands, and polluted beaches. Government and academia have clearly established the need for an integrated ecosystem-based approach to marine management to alleviate problems of fragmented management. However, in order to operationalize ecosystem-based management (EBM), the morass of law governing the ocean needs to be better understood so that place-specific problems can be prioritized and targeted in EBM planning.

Recognizing the growing need to provide objective analyses of ocean management, my dissertation project focused on exploring ways to answer questions about gaps and overlaps in management using this compilation of laws.

The compilation encompasses marine and coastal relevant codified State laws and regulations for Washington, Oregon, and California, and federal United States laws and regulations. The geographic scope of the dissertation project is the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem. There are 75,286 sections of law represented in these data, which are derived from 1,433 parent documents of law. The dataset is composed of individual term frequencies for every stemmed word in the collection (not including common words, such as 'and', 'a', and 'the'.